Bki:Xxxv To Fortune

O goddess, who rules our lovely Antium, always ready to lift up our mortal selves, from humble position, or alter proud triumphs to funeral processions, the poor farmer, in the fields, courts your favour with anxious prayers: you, mistress of ocean, the sailor who cuts the Carpathian Sea, in a Bithynian sailing boat: you, the fierce Dacian, wandering Scythian, cities, and peoples, and warlike Latium, mothers of barbarous kings, tyrants, clothed in their royal purple, all fear you, in case you demolish the standing pillar with a careless foot, or the tumultuous crowd incite the peaceful: ‘To arms, to arms’, and shatter the supreme authority. Grim Necessity always treads before you, and she’s carrying the spikes and the wedges in her bronze hand, and the harsh irons and the molten lead aren’t absent either. Hope cultivates you, and rarest Loyalty, her hands bound in sacred white, will not refuse her friendship when you, their enemy, desert the great houses plunged in mourning. But the disloyal mob, and the perjured whores vanish, and friends scatter when they’ve drunk our wine to the lees, unequal to bearing the heavy yoke of all our misfortunes. Guard our Caesar who’s soon setting off again against the earth’s far-off Britons, and guard the fresh young levies, who’ll scare the East in those regions along the Red Sea’s shores. Alas, the shame of our scars and wickedness, and our dead brothers. What has our harsh age spared? What sinfulness have we left untried? What have the young men held their hands back from, in fear of the gods? Where are the altars they’ve left alone? O may you remake our blunt weapons on fresh anvils so we can turn them against the Scythians and the Arabs.